My vision on visual knowledge building

In this short essay I will explain what my vision is of Visual Knowledge Building. I will explain what knowledge means to me. Why Knowledge Building Communities are important. The learning theory—Constructivism will be shown also. I will also explain why knowledge never stops. It has a process. Finally I will explain why people centric communication is the next step of knowledge building.

Knowledge itself

After some study, I’ve concluded that there’s no determined way of defining knowledge. That’s the reason I’ve created a mindmap to see what my personal perspective is on the definition of knowledge.

Basicly I think knowledge itself cannot be set free from a process. It’s not a holy object that can’t be reached. The Oxfort English Dictionary defined knowledge in various ways.

• 1. Facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
• 2. What is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information
• 3. Awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Philosophers are often agreed with Plato’s definition of knowledge: ‘ Justified true belief’. Another example from Buddhist sources, knowledge is just merely the understanding how the world works. While a wise person understands and is mindful of the true self. From these different perspectives I can conclude that culture is also a big factor on how knowledge is been defined.

I am sure that many philosophers will agree with my mindmap and that there’s not really a true definition for what knowledge is.

The importance of Knowledge Building Communities (KBC)

Knowledge is on-going and ever changing. That’s why knowledge is changing or it is been build. It cannot exist without human beings. Some knowledge is build in groups such as class-rooms, the research and development team of Schiphol Hilton Hotel or the research team at Erasmus Hospital. I still remember the phrase in Chinese, three peasants are better than one wise man. I think this phrase says it all about how important a KBC is. The three peasants will go through creation and innovation to get a problem solving solution. In this way knowledge will reach his value. It’s rather a collective achievement than a individual one. Like Scardamalia(2002) he agrees on the above idea that knowledge building is for a community. Scardamalia even goes a step further by identifying twelve principles of knowledge building.

1. Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world.

2. Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects.

3. Idea diversity. In the classroom, the diversity of ideas raised by students is necessary.

4. Rise above. Through a sustained improvement of ideas and understanding, students create higher level concepts.

5. Epistemic agency. Students themselves find their way in order to advance.

6. Community knowledge, collective responsibility. Students' contribution to improving their collective knowledge in the classroom is the primary purpose of the Knowledge building classroom.

7. Democratizing knowledge. All individuals are invited to contribute to the knowledge advancement in the classroom.

8. Symmetric knowledge advancement. A goal for Knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organizations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge.

9. Pervasive Knowledge building. Students contribute to collective Knowledge building.

10. Constructive uses of authoritative sources. All members, including the teacher, sustain inquiry as a natural approach to support their understanding.

11. Knowledge building discourse. Students are engaged in discourse to share with each other, and to improve the knowledge advancement in the classroom.

12. Concurrent, embedded, and transformative assessment. Students take a global view of their understanding, then decide how to approach their assessments. They create and engage in assessments in a variety of ways.

I really like these principles, especially ‘ democratizing knowledge’ . I work at the Schiphol Hilton Hotel. Recently they have cut some management positions and let the employees contribute in the thinking process. Employees are now been asked and triggered to come with ideas how to improve their business and lower the energy costs. I can see that all individuals are invited to contribute to knowledge advancement in the company. This is not just good for the business intelligence, but also the treatment to the employees is improved. They will have the idea of having a value in the company.

Constructivism the way of learning

Quote: “Knowledge building, can be considered as deep Constructivism (learning theory) (Scardamalia, 2002) that involves making a collective inquiry into a specific topic and coming to a deeper understanding through interactive questioning, dialogue and continuous improvement of ideas. Ideas are thus the medium of operation in knowledge building environments. The teacher becomes a guide rather than a director and allows students to take over a significant portion of the responsibility for their own learning including planning, execution and evaluation (Scardamalia, 2002)”.

As the quote of Scardamalia describes that knowledge building is actually considered to be Constructivism. I definitely agree with him that this way education is the best way to go beyond the existing knowledge. In this way boundaries can be found. In Asia this way of education is still not often been seen. The teacher is still a authority rather than a guide. Obedience is very important and I think this limits the idea of knowledge building. This way of education where there’s just one direction of where the information is coming and going to (teacher to student), doesn’t reach the boundaries of knowledge building. As a Buddhist I’ve learned that the Buddha is our guide rather the God to believe to. There’s this famous phrase: “Buddha’s teachings are just like the finger pointing to the direction of the moon. Find your way to the moon, don’t attach to the finger”.

Knowledge Ecology

In my mindmap I can see a certain process is needed to build knowledge. George Siemens goes a bit further with saying that knowledge building has a certain ecology. The figure above it shows which aspects this ecology has. Speaking of ecology from a Buddhist point of view, everything is in dependent origination. Everything is inter-depended from one of another. In this way even knowledge is build from different elements in different conditions. Without one condition or element knowledge can’t really reach its full result of problem-solving. From my personal point of view, George Siemens has the same idea as I do. He even goes a step further by showing the best performing mix of aspects in an effective ecology.

• · a space for gurus and beginners to connect,
• · a space for self-expression,
• · a space for debate and dialogue,
• · a space to search archived knowledge,
• · a space to learn in a structured manner,
• · a space to communicate new information and knowledge indicative of changing elements within the field of practice (news, research)
• · space to nurture ideas, test new approaches, prepare for new competition, pilot processes.

I am sure the medium or spaces that George Siemens describes above are important. As in my mindmap I show that the medium usage is important to build knowledge. From the experiences during the minor of VKB &VC, I can conclude that it is indeed important to have these kind of physical or virtual locations where everything is archived, searchable, in dialogue, structured and renewed by teachers, inspirators or students.

In this way the knowledge can be transported to another community or person all over the world.

Importance of Design & Usability

This essay is not just about knowledge building, but also discuss the ‘visual’ part of it. Design & Usability are through my opinion very important to the knowledge building. As George Siemens said that there’s a need of a space. This space can be physical or virtual. As we are living in a digital era, most of the information is distributed and build online. For example wiki-pages are knowledge building spaces where collective knowledge is been generated. So at the end the individual is obligated to reach information online. In this way the design principles are important. Examples like: golden ratio and chunking are important to receive information in a considerable matter.

Constantine and Lockwood describe a collection of principles for improving the quality of your user interface design. These principles are

The structure principle. Your design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with your overall user interface architecture.

The simplicity principle. Your design should make simple, common tasks simple to do, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.

The visibility principle. Your design should keep all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with too many alternatives or confuse them with unneeded information.

The feedback principle. Your design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.

The tolerance principle. Your design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.

The reuse principle. Your design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.

In my mindmap I show that usage of media is very important to transport the information to another. Like Siemens and Scardamalia says interaction is needed to build knowledge. Nowadays interactive tools are an important support to reach communication between the people. Tools like Wikipedia, Facebook and Blackboard are still not user-friendly enough. I think this is due to the fact that it’s still very conservative of using texts over graphics.

People Centric Communication

HTC came with People Centric Communication (PCC). This is an approach supports a new fresh look towards the structured matter of information. The search of archived knowledge has reached his full potential by using PCC.

Although the presentation is about mobile communication, I think it is surprisingly important how people are connected to each other. The idea that our life has become based on applications is just a little bit fussy. HTC came with the solution that communication should be people centred. After some contemplation I think that people are the directors or information pushers in a digital space. Therefore this approach of PCC should be taken into the idea of how people think in information nowadays. Even if we use references, we always describe from where the source is from.

Right and privileges to have access to information

I still remember the discussion with my Ghanese colleague about the believe in God. I told her that most people in the Netherland are educated at school with the Evolution Theory of Darwin. Surprisingly she had never heard of this theory. In this way I really saw that I was blessed (by God) to have access to information that she didn’t have. Somehow she was only limited to the bible. As from a Buddhist point of view, freedom to information with awareness of your own greed, anger and ignorance is very important for your own development and worldly view. But somehow not everyone has these privileges to receive or access information. I just hope that the children of the future are not just been exposed to information limited to one book or person.

Conclusion

Knowledge cannot exist without people. It’s build for a community and future generations. Visual Knowledge Building is related to ‘constructivism’. Scardamalia says that deeper understanding, through interactive questioning, dialogue and continuous improvement of ideas are improving the surface of knowledge building. George Siemens spaces and ecology affects the knowledge building. The fact that we need locations or media to have an collaborating interactive outcome of knowledge building, leads us to the importance of design of the user interface. Furthermore I see that the future is related to interaction and tools like blackboard and Wikipedia will be having more graphics combined with text. At the end I think People Centric Communication will play a important role of archiving information. Like great philosophers and discoverers have become famous, the information will idolized.

References

Scardamalia & Bereiter, Constructivism

George Siemens, Knowledge Building Ecology

William Lidwell, Universal Principles of Design

Constantine&Lockwood, Fundamentals of user interface design

Semiotics

Briefly describe the medium used, the genre to which the ‘text’ belongs and the context in which it was found.

The picture was found at funnypictures.com. The genre is quite difficult to define. Due to the fact it has something to do with cartoons, but also showing a bit of drama and fun. If the receiver recognizes the cartoon figures, Super Mario and Yoshi. Then the understanding of why Mario leaves and let Yoshi fall, will be much more clear. Obviously you will also understand the betrayal and abusing fact.

Why did you choose this ‘text’?

I find this ‘text’ interesting. How would you ever imagine that Super Mario could be a traitor? In this way Betrayal can be put in a more dramatic but also funny context. It’s a very creative way of showing the idea of ‘betrayal’.

How does the ‘text’ relate to your own values?

It’s showing in a more funny way how betrayal feels. It’s showing how people are been abused nowadays. It’s a serious ethical issue that happens often in our society at different levels. In this way it relates to my own values of how not to live as a human being.

What are the important signifiers and what do they signify?

Important signifiers are the word ‘Betrayal’, the jumping Mario, the falling Yoshi. They signify Betrayal.

How might a change of medium affect the meanings generated?

If we change the medium from a poster/picture to a textual story. It would be less funny for the receiver, if this signification was in a written story telling form. I think the fun factor will be less strong and the seriousness of this ethical subject will be increased.

How does one signifier relate to the others used (do some carry more weight than others)?

The word Betrayal is the most important signifier that supports the graphics. If the word wasn’t there, we would have interpret something else. Maybe losing or falling would be signified instead of betrayal.

What insights has a semiotic analysis of this ‘text’ offered?

I’ve learned what the difference is between a signifier and signified. The form and concept are both very important to show the signification. A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. I also discovered that we as human beings are driven by a desire to make meanings. We make meanings through our creation and interpretation of ‘signs’. Like Peirce said: ‘We think only in signs. Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign’.

As long somebody interprets the betrayal picture, referring to or standing for something other than itself, it has its own signification.

Cinematography-Instruction movie

My instruction video on how a Ch'an Buddhist does his prostration

First I wrote a script and took pictures of different positions during a prostration. After that I wrote down the text that I wanted to tell during the video. Also I picked out a background music that is related to prostrations.

Other examples of Instruction Videos

Japanese instruction videos are very detailed and often straight forward. There's no way you can get distracted by anything else from the video. The seriousness takes you into the informative state.

Nigella Lawson shows in a more subtle and relaxing way how to prepare a cherry-cheesecake. The instruction video is also filled with other moments that isn't related to the instruction content. Her enjoyable moments during cooking makes it not just an instruction video.

Photography 2

Color upon color

In the following photo-essay I would like to show the strength but also the weakness of color. Each color gives a particular feeling. The feeling is personal. Therefor when we use colors in our visual communication, we have to remember that the color we use to wrap our contextual message in, should not distract the receiver from the actual meaning.

Sketch Book

Facebook is an analogy of a knowledge building community. Supports/fosters learning, adaptive, dynamic, responsive, chaotic, self-organizing, structured informality, diverse, alive and emerging.

HTC discovered the importance of visual communication. The icons are more attractive. Next to the visual communication, the designed 'People Centric Communication'. This is one of the most important improvements of the HTC smartphone.

My digital world is full with Web 2.0 results. If you ask me whether I can live without them. No, sorry! They are all part of my identity nowadays. My connection to the world is far more important than anything else.

I remember in the movie of Flick Radio a quote: With one tag you give a photo a future. With the prosuming attitude we have nowadays, all our content is going to be meaningful for later.

Above a very nice way of showing how Web 2.0 is started and how it now affects our world. I find it very interesting, because at the end the professor tells us to rethink of Web 2.0. Because Web 2.0 is us. We created Web 2.0, but unawarely.

This movie clip above shows the emotive awareness file of C. S. D. Lim. The Digital Motion Graphic Artist I was talking about. He uses graphics to express the abstract meaning of his household of emotions. There's also a bit of Buddhist flavors entangled within this movie.

I really like the movie, not just because of the content. I really like the usage of good visual communication supporting the presentation.

Photography 1

Photo Sequences

Mr. Usb going home tells the story about that our work is stored in a usb stick nowadays. 10 years ago we brought our work in folders and papers. Will Mr. Usb still going home like he does right now in 10 years from now?

Photo Sequence dedicated to Kuuru. This cute dog is a animation figure from Studio Ghibli in Tokyo.

Web 2.0

Knowledge can be gained by using technologies. Students and teachers of Universities like INHOLLAND are using Blackboard as a tool to gain knowledge. Other examples are Kennisportal.nl, Fidelio, Micros and Smartbutler. One conclusion can be made of all these knowledge gainment tools. Content is needed. The content can only be made and put on these databases by people. So basicly it's just another movement of knowledge or information from people into a bigger system. The tools in the social media could also be used for knowledge gain support. The mindmap above (click to enlarge the picture), shows my basic idea how knowledge can be gained through social web. Again we see that content, teachers/inspirators, structure and technology is needed.

Above I show an AMV (Anime Music Video). This is a perfect example of a result of a prosumer. This is product of a consumer and a producer together. A perfect example of using content that was created by others and recreate it in a new context.

The Web 2.0 idea for international students

It would be great to create a profile website for our international students of all INHOLLAND Hogeschools. In this way they can keep in contact with each other and INHOLLAND can provide services to this group. Also, outsource services can be in this model involved. In this way there are three big parties together in this project.

Profile sites and Self-Portraits

Most pictures in my social network on Facebook are just pictures showing the face clearly. The discourse is very simple and clear. Facial expressions are the most important when it comes to non-verbal communication. Nevertheless some people are also putting a large variety of pictures as their profile photo with a organic, industrial, food&beverage content. These are the more creative users that tend to choose a different way of expressing themselves. The content could tell much more about the person.

For example: a friend of mine shows his picture in a very creative way. He used photoshop and illustrator to change the photo in a more cartoon-like result. This is how he wants to express his profession in his own so called self-portrait.

Another example: a picture showing a ‘honey-biscuit’, symoblising the sweetness from the inside and the tuffness from the outside.

I believe self-portraits are merely a symbol expressing a deeper meaning of that person. It’s merely a metaphor explaining the person or partial how that person is. A profile site is quite important to me. I use it merely to put embedded content in my own page. The content is showing my interests, visions, ideas etc. But the most important is to show others how I feel, think, what I do………. If it was merely a location where I put my stuff, and nobody would have a look at it, I won’t keep putting things on it. It’s a consuming satisfaction when somebody actually reads how I am doing.

Self-Portrait

Here's my assignment about Self-Portraits

My own profile photo taken when I just 21. It was the turning period of letting go of my chosen major and heading for a new direction in life.

Quote: When sitting quietly, contemplate your mistakes. When chatting, don't criticize others.

When I think of Self-Portraits, I immediately will think of the Dutch Expressionism Painter Vincent van Gogh.

His behavior as an artist always made an impression on me. Somehow a great artist like him could be insane. His paintings shows us that insanity doesn't necessarily mean the dark side of life

Chun See Daniel Lim is a good friend and a great motion graphic artist. His work was at first based on 2D work. But he has put his mind into the 3D modeling at the moment.

He uses Adobe programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. His 3D work is made with 4D Cinema.

Edvard Munch (1863) painted this interesting painting. The painting is named 'The Scream'. It was based on a traumatic experience. He said: I don't paint what I see, but only what I have seen.

It's about his inner experience, a mental defilement. I think this painting shows us the sorrows and misery of life. Our biggest enemy is one self. The self that has created our own fears.

My favorite drawings of all time are from Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) His drawings always let people into confusing moments. His graphics are designed to show the cognitive dissonance. It shows how structured our perception is created by our own mind.

One of his quotes: 'I am playing a tiring game'. I think his thought of these words was that the human mind is not letting go of their patterns. He plays the game by drawing these confusing drawings, but he somehow knows that people are not letting go. That's why it's so tiring!

YewMiin Chu born in October 30th 1985. She's a Malaysian born Chinese and a young film maker. This interesting photograph shows her midnight labor has gone to a higher creative state. It shows the mixture of the digital world and her covered face.

Quote: 'My forgetful hopelessness'.

Welcome

During my English minor Visual Knowledge Building & Visual Communication, I've gained a certain vision on how things work in the world of texts and visuals. In this blog I show my assignments and assessments.